Tag: estimates

Making good estimates (with martinis)

I typically ignore planning in this blog. Not because it isn’t important, but because it isn’t important until later. You need to be able to deliver if you want your plans to mean anything.

However, there is one topic that I think worth discussing: estimating your work. I find this worth discussing because I see so many people do it wrong and suffer massive pain that they could have avoided.

Which causes deadline pressure. Which prevents them from making the improvements that would help them deliver. Continue reading “Making good estimates (with martinis)”

Planning with any hope of accuracy

In one sense, units don’t matter at all. In another they are critical. It’s all human psych.

The fundamental problem is a cognitive bias termed the Planning Fallacy. This well-documented bias shows that the human brain, even with training, always estimates outcomes on the information it knows. We have a well-researched, systemic bias that causes us to consistently under-estimate, even when we take this bias into account during estimation.

In the Agile world, we accidentally discovered a system that works around that bias. But most of us don’t know that we’re applying it, and the others don’t see why they should. Continue reading “Planning with any hope of accuracy”